Emory Douglas, the former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party (BPP), and artist Caleb Duarte will present art and photography from the Zapatista Negra art project, which brought Douglas to Chiapas, Mexico to work with Zapatista artists in combining the revolutionary artistic traditions of these two groups.

At its peak in 1970, 139,000 copies of The Black Panther newsletter were distributed weekly throughout the US. Within its pages, Emory Douglas published his artwork in an effort to “construct a visual mythology of power for people who felt powerless and victimized.” In 1994, the Zapatista uprising, an indigenous movement originating in Mexico’s state of Chiapas, disseminated a different sort of mass communication made possible by the rise of the internet. The BPP and Zapatista movements occurred in distinct cultural, political, and historical milieus but the two share a common appreciation of the power of the image and the written word to build their respective social movements into personal, collective, and transformative experiences.